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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean
  • Cited by 16
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2014
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139028387
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139028387
Subjects:
Ancient History, Classical Studies, Classical Archaeology, Archaeology
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Ancient History & Classics
Information

Book description

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean offers new insights into the material and social practices of many different Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration, and colonization; hybridization and cultural encounters; materiality, memory, and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume's broad coverage of different approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will help practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways. Together, the essays in this volume shed new light on the people, ideas, and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Awards

Honourable Mention, 2016 PROSE Award for Single Volume Reference in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Reviews

'A magnificently multi-faceted, intellectually challenging collection of scholarly voices and interpretations that matches the complexity and dynamism of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean itself. This book will be a stimulus to fresh thinking in and beyond the Middle Sea for many years to come, as well as an ideal point of access for the less familiar.'

Cyprian Broodbank - John Disney Professor of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

'The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean is ambitious, comparative, thematic, challenging, informative and bang up-to-date, helping readers to grasp the similarities and diversity of Mediterranean communities and societies in the last two millennia BC. The clarity of presentation makes it a pleasure to read.'

Bob Chapman - University of Reading

'Widely ranging knowledgeable syntheses of Mediterranean later prehistory that are also theoretically informed are rare; those seeking not to shelter in a regional ghetto but engaging with wider archaeology and history rarer still. This welcome volume is all of the above, and thus both important and special.'

Sturt W. Manning - Goldwin Smith Chair of Classical Archaeology and Director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, Cornell University

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 19 - Beyond Iconography: Meaning-Making in Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Visual and Material Culture
    pp 337-351
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the island of Sardinia during the Iron Age to identify the types of interactions between the local Nuragic culture, which was already open to Mediterranean contacts in the Recent and Final Bronze Ages, and other populations around the Tyrrhenian Sea and in the Near East. In the Iron Age, as Sardinians managed contacts with Villanovan and Levantine peoples, they carefully selected ideological contributions and foreign materials, changing, adapting and integrating them into their own culture. Phoenicians first established themselves within Nuragic communities and later in coastal settlements, where their presence favoured the integration process. It contributed to the creation of a culture that was neither Nuragic nor Phoenician but that can define as Sardinian. The main differences between the coastal Phoenician sites and Nuragic sites of the interior consist of different proportions of handmade and domestic Phoenician pottery. Finally, the chapter discusses the variety of foreign imports in later Iron Age Sardinia.
  • 20 - Changes in Perceptions of the ‘Other’ and Expressions of Egyptian Self-identity in the Late Bronze Age
    pp 352-366
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter first discusses various methodological concerns related to Cypriote iconography, before turning to a series of limestone images depicting a tri-corporate warrior, traditionally associated with the Greek Geryon, that appears in Cypriot sanctuaries during the Archaic period. There have been two fundamental approaches to interpreting divine images dedicated in Cypriot sanctuaries. The first approach assumes a wholesale transferal of both image and meaning from a foreign origin to the island, and the second approach focuses on local contexts for divine iconography and related rituals. In Greek art, the myth was especially popular in the sixth century BC among representations of the many exploits of Herakles, who was himself a favorite in Archaic Greece. The isolation of hybridization processes in art shifts the focus from origins and streams of influence to genesis and agency. Finally, the chapter suggests a more nuanced approach that focuses on the transmission, translation, and reception of religious iconography and the productive capacity of cultural interactions.
  • 21 - The Lure of the Artefact? The Effects of Acquiring Eastern Mediterranean Material Culture
    pp 367-378
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the interactions that took place in the western Mediterranean from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age between different communities that are usually grouped together under the homogenising and external labels of indigenous, Phoenician and Greek. It argues that the degrees of interaction and the local logic of actions are keys to a nuanced understanding of these situations. The chapter focuses on the practical decisions and actions of all the parties involved, both foreign and indigenous. Finally, it highlights relevant local practices of daily life such as knowledge transfer of pottery production techniques, social heterogeneity, Phoenician settlements, regimes of value in domains ranging from metal exchange to wine trade, changing patterns of food consumption and the creation of new foodways and even the display of forms of violence, taking into account the social, cultural and economic transformations of all the actors involved.
  • Community and Household
    pp 395-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on changes in Cretan ritual practices from ca. 1000 to 700 BC. The idea that Early Iron Age (EIA) Crete's history and culture developed along peculiar lines informs, perhaps even justifies, much current scholarship, including the present contribution. Clearly, the differences matter, but in order to bring them out in sharp-relief, study of the island's connections and correspondences with other regions in the wider Mediterranean world is vital. The chapter discusses how scholars see Cretan idiosyncrasies. Two major idiosyncrasies have been recognised: the relatively strong continuity of Minoan traditions, and the early and pronounced Orientalising qualities of the island's material culture. There was a change in local attitudes to vestiges of the Bronze-Age past, as best exemplified by the inception of cult activities amid the ruins of monumental. Phaistos and Knossos, had been the seat of an important Later Bronze Age palace and settlement that continued to be inhabited through the EIA and later.
  • 23 - Rethinking the Late Cypriot Built Environment: Households and Communities as Places of Social Transformation
    pp 399-416
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Artistic interconnections in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean are often considered through the lens of iconography as a window onto motif transference. The iconographic method is most often associated with Erwin Panofsky and in particular with his elaboration of it first in his 1939 Studies in Iconology and later in his 1955 Meaning in the Visual Arts. First, the chapter pursues an alternative approach to meaning in the visual culture of the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, with the express intent of moving beyond the shortcomings of the iconographic approach. To do this, author draw heavily upon Keane's theories regarding materiality and signification. The chapter presents an extended study, cylinder seals in the Late Bronze Age Greek mainland, carved monumental ashlar architecture, frescoes, and Mycenaean pottery, in order to explore fully the range of possible meaning-making processes. Finally, it concludes with a short consideration of the continuity of meaning in Hittite-carved architectural reliefs.
  • 24 - Households, Hierarchies, Territories and Landscapes in Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece
    pp 417-436
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter presents evidence from Theban tombs and mortuary temples to show that expressions of 'others' and of self-identity changed as the Egyptian elite adjusted to a new perceptual reality, one in which Egypt increasingly became part of the Mediterranean world. It states that texts and images included in Egyptian-mortuary contexts were not there primarily to record historical-events but to demonstrate the qualities of the person whom they commemorated. Representations in Theban private tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty show northerners as offering-bearers. These tombs generally belonged to members of the Egyptian high elite, high priests of Amun, viziers, and mayors of Thebes, many of whom held several positions during their careers. A pertinent example is Menkheperreseneb, a High Priest of Amun under Thutmose III in the Eighteenth-Dynasty, interred in Theban Tomb. Northerners depicted at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of the Twentieth-Dynasty king now generally known as Ramesses III, serve a similar function, albeit in a different way.
  • 25 - Connectivity Beyond the Urban Community in Central Italy
    pp 437-453
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The relationship between people and things is a crucial avenue of investigation in understanding past cultures. An examination of the social contexts and the consequences of consuming material culture are integral to a fuller understanding of archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean. The interplay of these spheres provides an intriguing lens for the examination of the lure of relics from the Bronze and Iron Ages. This chapter examines the collecting of archaeological materials, the deleterious effects on the archaeological landscape and the object biographies of those artefacts enmeshed in the trade in antiquities. As artefacts are collected, they undergo a series of transformations, utilitarian and metaphorical. The chapter presents case studies, Moshe Dayan, the Israel Museum, the quest for an Israeli Past, Shelby White and Leon Levy, admiration for the Keros Hoard, to illustrate the varied high-end collecting personae and rationales involved with the acquisition and longing for archaeological material from the eastern Mediterranean.
  • 26 - Long-Term Social Change in Iron Age Northern Iberia (ca. 700–200 BC)
    pp 454-470
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores practices of rock carving on the Anatolian peninsula from a diachronic perspective, with special emphasis on the Late Bronze Age and Early-Middle Iron Ages. Linking together the materiality of monuments, rock-carving technologies and issues of landscape imagination, it focuses on the commemorative rock reliefs across the Anatolian landscape. The monuments of concern range from Hittite and post-Hittite commemorative rock reliefs to Urartian, Phrygian and Paphlagonian practices of carving the living rock for cultic, commemorative and funerary purposes. The chapter also critiques the specialised art historical and epigraphic approaches to rock reliefs and rock-cut structures, which portray them as stand-alone monuments and show a certain disregard for their micro-geographical context. Finally, it contributes to studies of landscape and place in Mediterranean archaeology by promoting a shift of focus from macro-scale explanations of the environment to micro-scale engagement with located practices of place-making.
  • 28 - Landscapes and Seascapes of Southwest Iberia in the First Millennium BC
    pp 488-505
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The transition to the Late Bronze Age was characterized by fundamental changes in the nature of Cypriot society as it shifted from being largely egalitarian and inward looking to socially stratified and cosmopolitan. This chapter proposes an agent-centered approach to investigating the dynamic interrelationship between people and place. It then discusses the Protohistoric Bronze Age house and household, emphasizing the role of the house as a place that materialized social boundaries and structured social interaction among household members, and between residents and visitors in the course of daily practice. Wilk and W. L. Rathje defined the household as consisting of the social, the material, and the behavioral. The chapter concludes by examining the household within its urban context by considering how its members became increasingly enmeshed in various urban communities, from neighborhoods through to the city itself, and how this was manifested in the materiality of house design, boundary maintenance, and city planning.
  • 29 - Domestic and Settlement Organisation in Iron Age Southern France
    pp 506-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter investigates how the sociopolitical meanings and the practical significance of land were entwined in Bronze and Iron Ages Greece to shape landscapes and territories by approaching settlement hierarchies from a new perspective. It presents two case studies that cover the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages. The first focuses on the area of Messenia, Pylos and Nichoria in the southwest Peloponnese of mainland Greece, the area of a major Bronze Age polity that changed radically in terms of its political and social geography during the Iron Age. The second focuses on the area around Mirabello Bay in east Crete, where the complex settlement record of the later Bronze and Iron Ages has been particularly well explored. There are two substantial excavated farmsteads in the Mirabello Bay region: Chrysokamino and Chalinomouri. For both, excavation and microlevel studies have been carried out on the houses themselves and in their immediate vicinity.
  • 30 - Beyond the General and the Particular: Rethinking Death, Memory and Belonging in Early Bronze Age Crete
    pp 525-539
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The analysis of the development of social complexity among the peoples of the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula has broadly followed the general trends of European and North American archaeology. This chapter proposes a new synthesis of the processes of change between the Late Bronze Age and the Roman conquest in the northern regions of the Iberian culture area. First, it considers Godelier's structural Marxist evolutionary hypothesis, which is compatible with Johnson and Earle's model but hard to substantiate with the available data. According to Godelier's hypothesis, the transformation of an early Iron Age Great Man into a Big Man society requires some conditions. Then, the chapter examines role of culture contact and trade with colonial societies such as Phoenician, Etruscan and Greek. The chapter concludes that foreign trade was instrumental for indigenous elites to acquire and consolidate their privileged status; it probably did not play a significant role as a cause for social change.
  • 31 - From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First: Understanding the Bronze Age Argaric Lifecourse in the Mediterranean ‘Far West’
    pp 540-553
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Iberian houses display a wide variety of plans, sizes and uses of space. This variety of types, together with their household items and equipment, make up the available data for analysing the various levels of the family and social organisation of the Iberians. In the Iberian area of Valencia, a settlement hierarchy has been described on the basis of both site size and settlement layout and function. A range of settlement types have been excavated in the territories of the towns of Edeta and Kelin. This chapter talks about an Oppidum of La Bastida de les Alcusses, and difference between rural and urban houses, between peasants and craftsmen and even between owners and non-owners. Settlement in the hinterland of the towns and large oppida was made up of fortified sites, such as villages, hamlets, farms and fortlets, and a large number of non-fortified sites of an evidently rural nature such as farms and wineries.
  • 32 - Crossing Borders: Death and Life in Second Millennium BC Southern Iberia and North Africa
    pp 554-570
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During the first millennium BC, the geography of southwest Iberia, its coasts and internal territories were the set for a complex historical process that involved indigenous populations, Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians that resulted in the ethno-cultural mosaic about which Greek and Roman authors have reported. This chapter focuses on connection routes, forms of contacts and interaction between landscapes and human groups and the different levels of socio-economic and politico-ideological complexity that developed over time. It begins with the Tyrian foundation of Gadir, as this town would later become the centre of an extensive network of inter-regional relations, articulated around primary centres such as Huelva, lower Guadalquivir, as well as coastal and interior peripheries such as south-central Portugal, Extremadura, southern Meseta and upper Guadalquivir. The chapter explains the sixth-century crisis and its impact on coastal southwest Iberia. In time, the entire southwest was reoriented towards Rome and underwent profound political, socioeconomic and cultural reorganisations usually captured by the term Romanisation.
  • 33 - An Entangled Past: Island Interactions, Mortuary Practices and the Negotiation of Identities on Early Iron Age Cyprus
    pp 571-584
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter concerns domestic architecture and its occupants in Mediterranean France during the Iron Age. Houses provide crucial information about protohistoric households and society, as they constituted the focus of daily life and stood at the centre of economic, cultural and social activities. The earliest houses in southern Gaul coexisted with those built in wattle and daub. The appearance of new settlement-patterns, architectural forms and building techniques have often been interpreted as related to colonial encounters. Some evidence indicates a substantial continuity in the use of space from the Late Bronze Age onwards. During the early fifth-century BC in Arles, housing blocks have been brought to light in the Jardin d'Hiver area, where houses were made up of a large courtyard. Courtyards or more generally uncovered spaces constituted an important feature of domestic-life in southern Gaul from the early Iron Age onwards. The central courtyard houses differed from their protohistoric counterparts in both ground plan and conception of space.
  • 35 - The Early Bronze Age Southern Levant: The Ideology of an Aniconic Reformation
    pp 609-618
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The El Argar culture, spanning the years 2200-1500 Cal BC in southeastern Iberia's Bronze Age, is one of the best-known prehistoric periods in the western Mediterranean. This chapter first discusses traditional accounts of Argaric culture. It then talks about recent developments in research on the mortuary records that question long-established assumptions, examines hitherto unstudied practices and opens up new avenues for interpretation and analysis. The chapter also focuses on the re-evaluation of the warlike nature of Argaric societies, and assesses studies of commensality rituals in funerals. There are two main sources of archaeological evidence that allegedly illustrate the warlike nature of Argaric society: the emergence of specialised weaponry and the very characteristics of Argaric settlements in relation to their location and some of their structures, interpreted as defensive. Commensal pottery and animal bones found in burials are two major sources of evidence for the study of Argaric funerary commensality practices. Finally, the chapter examines works dealing with daily maintenance activities.
  • 36 - Ritual as the Setting for Contentious Interaction: From Social Negotiation to Institutionalised Authority in Bronze Age Cyprus
    pp 619-634
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter takes a macro-scale perspective of the mortuary record of the second millennium BC, the Early-Middle Bronze Age of southern Iberia. It considers three Bronze Age culture areas that are most commonly considered separately: the Iberian southwest, the southeast or Argaric, North Africa and the role of the Mediterranean as a geographic space and an ecological regime. The chapter discusses important themes that transcend the regional focus of Iberia and North Africa, such as the long use and reuse of tombs, the contributions of bioarchaeology toward understanding the lives of ancient peoples. It also examines how the living transformed the dead through ritual practices during the Early and Middle Bronze Age of southern Iberia. Finally, the chapter discusses the construction of the burial chamber, the manipulation of the body, and the offering of goods to accompany the deceased. Ceramics and metal weapons and tools were generally placed with the deceased in the Middle Bronze Age.
  • 37 - Cult Activities among Central and North Italian Protohistoric Communities
    pp 635-649
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the Iron Age archaeology of Cyprus, from the end of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) to the start of the Cypro-Archaic period, ca. 1200-700 BC. First, it considers how the material culture of mortuary practices was actively involved in the multiple social and spatial dynamics, including maritime connections, migrations, colonial encounters and intra-island interactions, that occurred with the collapse of larger, regional palatial societies at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The chapter mainly focuses on the mortuary landscape of Cyprus's East Coast, such as Enkomi, Salamis and Palaepaphos, during the LBA-Early Iron Age. The power of elite groups began to change as the geographical, social and political landscapes shifted; this is reflected in new, hybridised burial practices at Cypro-Geometric period I Salamis. Finally, the chapter explores how the emergence of a city-kingdom was strongly influenced by the prevailing sociopolitical environment at Salamis at the start of the IA.
  • 38 - Ritual and Ideology in Early Iron Age Crete: The Role of the Past and the East
    pp 650-664
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines cemeteries to investigate the complex dynamics of ethnogenesis and the construction of collective identity and elite group ideologies in central Italy during the Early Iron Age (EIA) and the so-called Orientalizing period. It overviews dynamics of interaction between Etruscans, Greeks, Phoenicians, and other people from the East in the Tyrrhenian context. The chapter investigates the notion of symbolic violence as proposed by Bourdieu and Godelier as a central aspect of collective group as well as individual strategies, and of power rituals in the EIA and the Orientalizing period in Etruria. As the funerary ideology of the Etruscan EIA recalls a picture of sociopolitical dialectics between collective trends and specific group or individual features and between conservatism and innovation in constant interplay with the criteria of status, gender, and age, there is no shortage of ambiguities and differences. Hut-shaped urns are of crucial importance for understanding the socio-ritual and gender dialectics, even if they are relatively uncommon.

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